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ADW.Launcher for Android hands on: attractive and highly customizable, but bloated
Sitting like rough and tawdry monarchs atop of the Android home screen and app launcher pile are LauncherPro and ADW.Launcher. We've reviewed Zeam Launcher, and looked at Go Launcher and QuickDesk, but somehow the two big boys have always escaped our critical eye. Well, no more!Today we're going to look at ADW.Launcher. It's a free download, but there's an 'EX' version that will cost you about $3. It shares a lot of its features with Zeam -- and its looks are somewhat similar, too -- but ADW is a lot more customizable. There are also a healthy number of ADW themes from third party developers, which provide easy access to 'unique' and sexy home screens.
Right then! Roll up your pants, it's time to wade in.
Smooth
In many ways, ADW.Launcher feels like a bigger brother of Zeam. Swiping between each of the five home screens is smooth, and you can zoom out, just like Zeam -- but instead of double tapping, you tap the Home button. You get a dock at the bottom which works just like Zeam's, but instead of being able to scroll you're limited to just five docked shortcuts.
ADW supports gestures, too. By default, swiping down expands the Notification Bar, meaning you no longer have to aim for that tiny sliver of grey at the top of the screen -- hooray! Swiping up hides the Notification Bar entirely. You can re-bind both swipes to other actions, if you like -- but for some reason, double tap isn't available with ADW; boo.
More options than you could ever possibly need
Usually I would take screenshots of the config pages, so you can check out just how configurable an app is... but ADW would require about 10 screenshots -- so, suffice it to say, ADW is really customizable. Of course, the problem with options and choices is that you have to choose the right one. How is a first-time user meant to know the best "Page Horizontal Margin", or how many milliseconds the "Zoom effect speed" should be? To be honest, ADW's mindbogglingly massive menu system scares me. It uses terms like "App Drawer", "Catalogs navigation", "Desktop overshoot" and "Action Buttons" -- and I could only begin to guess what one of those things is. Basically, to configure ADW, I had to resort to trial and error -- but when you don't know what to look for, it's hard to see the effects of a config change. Infuriating.
The crazy thing is, there isn't even a link to the documentation on the AppBrain site. Suitably irked, I headed to xda-developers (by far the best resource on the Web for Android-related issues, incidentally) to see if anyone else had had the same problem. Sure enough, there's a Complete Guide To ADW. If you're going to install ADW after this review, please read it.
Themes
Bloated conclusion
All in all, it's perhaps no surprise that ADW's burgeoning feature set make it a bit bloated. It feels slower than Zeam or the stock Android 2.1 launcher. It takes longer to appear after closing a program, and it's simply tiring to go through each of the many options to find out what they do. One of our commenters, Nyar, even noted that ADW has the tendency to hang for a few seconds on phones with slower processors.Unless you are after ADW's extensive theme library, then, Zeam is the better option.
Comments
13
Subscribe to commentsEvilHJan 12th 2011 3:40PM
While I agree the myriad of options in ADW can be confusing, particularly for the average user, I would not call it "bloated". I have ran ADW for ages and it has always been quite snappy on all my phones (G1, G2, Cliq, N1) and has only improved on speed and features since then. ADWLauncherEX has the ability to turn off the normal dock and use the secondary dock (generally accessed by swiping up on the home screen) which is scrollable and supports more than 5 icons. I believe this feature may also be in normal ADW too but I don't have it installed to verify.
VincentLJan 12th 2011 4:14PM
@EvilH
I would say its bloated. On my droid 2 i find ADW to be slower than the default motoblur launcher (which is already pretty slow itself). The scrolling from homescreen to homescreen is nicer, however opening the app drawer shows how laggy ADW can get. Closing out of other apps will show me just my wallpaper and it will take a few seconds to show ADW.
Launcher Pro and Zeam seem to be better in terms of speed. I used Launcher Pro pretty extensively before and was not happy with its paid features (the widgets are cumbersome and slow) and it got slower and buggier after about 6 weeks. Im going to swtich to Zeam and see if that gives me the best speed.
This is the problem with android... with a 1ghz processor and 256mb of RAM i shouldnt have to find an alternative program that makes my menu run smoothly...
NyaRJan 12th 2011 4:51PM
@EvilH
ADW is snappy as long as you load nothing but ADW. When you are exiting an app that took all your ram and reloading ADW it is typical to see no user icons and no launcher for 10+ seconds. Zeam has not passed 3 second load time yet.
DavidJan 12th 2011 3:37PM
I like Launcher Pro the best. Do that one next!
Sebastian AnthonyJan 13th 2011 7:27PM
@David Launcher Pro is next, don't worry!
Sebastian AnthonyJan 13th 2011 7:28PM
@VincentL I had the same experience as Nyar, I'm afraid :(
whacksterJan 12th 2011 4:44PM
Zeam feels less bloated because it is based on ADW Launcher (free and open source). When I say based, I mean ripped off and stripped code...
Sebastian AnthonyJan 13th 2011 7:27PM
@whackster Are you sure Zeam is based on ADW? That'd be interesting, if so :)
shang.datJan 12th 2011 5:49PM
You got something wrong, ADW Launcher has a scrollable dock (which may be where Zeam got the idea from). Hold the App Drawer button down on the homescreen and drag up. It should reveal the fade out black dock where you can put as many apps as you want.
Also don't know about you but ADW Launcher is barely ever laggy on my 800Mhz Samsung Galaxy Spica, which is definitely not a "higher spec" Android phone. It's actually better than Samsung stock launcher due to the fact you can resize widgets.
someoneJan 12th 2011 6:48PM
i tried it yesterday, got confused with the terminology (as mentioned in the article), messed around, then gave up. Gave up because i realised that adw doesn't offer too much more than what the interface on my SE x10 mini pro already does, considering it is an app that runs continually in the background, eating up my ph's resources. in fact i was disappointed that i couldn't customise it such that i can access my apps by swiping up on the home screen.
eatbleach69Jan 12th 2011 9:47PM
Some of you guys should just look at what ADW can do.... it's really nice if you don't run away after 1 minute
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD5WD-HDagM
RefthekingJan 13th 2011 7:25PM
Why so many comparisons with Zeam? ADW has been around for a while now and is also pre-loaded with Cyanogen Roms, with the Recent release of EX this thing need not be compared with Zeam but Zeam with It.
Sebastian AnthonyJan 13th 2011 7:28PM
@Reftheking Because I reviewed Zeam the day before; no other reason :)